Monthly Archives: February 2009

Nefarious has told me that for her birthday she would like me to paint a new portrait of her, with a unicorn. I was thinking I might do one based on the many medieval pictures of young women capturing unicorns, drawing inspiration from paintings like the ones below — “Wild women with unicorn” (1500), “The Maiden and the Unicorn” (1602, Zampieri), “A Maiden with a Unicorn” (1478, Da Vinci), “The young woman and the unicorn” (1470, Platearius), “Maiden with Unicorn” (15th century tapestry), and “The Woman with the Unicorn” (1505, Raphael).

Today Nefarious and I read quite a lot of Coraline — we’re nearly finished. At first she was a little worried that it would be too scary for her, being the most “adult” book we’ve read, but it’s completely entranced her and we must have read a good fifty pages of it today and were it not for the need to cook supper, we’d have read more. It’s definitely nice that she’s now at the point where she can read books that I enjoy as much as she does.

I didn’t draw either of these; they’re just pieces of clip art that I found.

Sadly, my laptop is nearly dead after years of great service… I’m typing this on a USB keyboard, and the CD drive has had some sort of problem where it sometimes reverts its driver to PIO mode (instead of Ultra DMA), which eats up CPU cycles with needless hardware interrupts until I uninstall the driver and let it reinstall itself properly. This was a big pain in the ass to diagnose the first time! I think when I move I’ll be going back to a desktop solution.

Here’s a couple of paintings from the book project. As you can see I’m starting to put the final touches on them. It will definitely be nice to finally be finished so I can move on to the next idea! Other than that, since today I “pancake day” I suppose I’ll have to come up with something clever for supper.

I think that when a kid gets older, specialization and limitation is more important in order to build up specific expertise, but my feeling for younger kids is that it’s important to get a bit of everything — play with friends, solo play, skill-building video games, strategy games like chess and zig-zag and abalone, physical challenges of all sorts, mental challenges of all sorts, reading and writing and story telling (and yes, even TV), tests of responsibility and independence, science and history exploration, mischief and rule testing, and rule enforcement — in order to build the foundation of a robust individual that can become anything they later choose to. Nefarious and I go in phases of what physical activities we do after school, but I sure do enjoy the days that we go swimming. Today the pool was swelteringly hot — entering the pool room took my breath away… it was like a sauna. In the bad news department both of our goggles finally broke, but still, lots of fun.

Other than that, I successfully wrote my first Firefox extension today (a simple search bar — here’s a good tutorial if you want to try). It’s actually pretty simple — although with Javascript skills as poor as mine, “simple” may be a stretch. Anyway, feel free to add yourself to the mailing list at MyPrivatePla.net, and in time you’ll see why I’m brushing up on these skills.